


Scrawled in the Margins

by JellyDishes



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Ficlet Collection, Gen, M/M, these run through various moods from angsty to fluff
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-10
Updated: 2020-04-02
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:15:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 3,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21745849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JellyDishes/pseuds/JellyDishes
Summary: A collection of ficlets that each explore a moment in time from the lives of the characters of Dragon Age, with the accompanying moodboards that inspired them.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This first chapter will be comprised of the shorter ficlets and accompanying aesthetics

Varric gave a forced laugh that was too loud in the eerie, echoing silences of the fade and turned away from the moldering tombstone and its words, "Varric Tethras: Become his parents."

* * *

She watched the noblemen’s daughters mingling in the courtyard with a strange expression. “I’m not like them, am I?”

Loghain’s fingers slowed but did not stop plaiting Anora’s hair. “No. You aren’t.”

“Good,” she said with a determined nod of her head. “That means there’s nobody like me, either.”

* * *

Anders tipped his head back so that the rain poured down his skin and stared up at the boiling clouds. His lips parted. “This is the first time I’ve felt rain on my skin in almost twenty years,” he whispered to no one at all. Hearing the words aloud made him start worse than the thunder that came after, and he laughed until his sides hurt.


	2. Chapter 2

Leliana blew a flyaway lock of hair away from her face with a huff, but it fell right back into place. “This is why everyone says Fereldan is an uncivilized backwater,” she said plaintively.

“I’m sure they dont,” the warden replied with an entirely unfair and unjustified smirk.

“They also say it smells.”

“That’s just y-”

“And,” Leliana added with a triumphant stab at the air with a calloused finger, one that was, naturally, capped with a perfectly manicured nail, “that the mud clings to everything and makes wearing anything fun just…. the **most** un-fun.”


	3. Chapter 3

Leliana didn’t look away from where the sunset splashed the mountains in the vivid colors of a bruise. “Someday all of this will mean nothing,” she said as if to herself. “And everything. That brings some small comfort, no?”

“No,” was Zevran’s reply.

“I suppose it doesn’t,” she laughed softly. “But we are going to keep going anyway, because someone must. And that grants it that meaning. Maybe just a gleaming of it, but that’s enough for me.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This particular ficlet was expanded on upon request, and has been posted as it's own story as well, titled The Drum Where Your Heart Should Be

Zevran watched Morrigan out of the corner of his eye as she paced around one evening at camp. She’d cupped her elbows, brows furrowing more and more with every step until at last she spoke when she was turned partially away. “Why does she try so hard convince me that I can say whatever I want to her? We both know there are limits. Even outside of trying to bite her head off,” she snorted. 

“And here you stand as a human. One assumes that she was referring to honesty or some such thing. Communication is supposed to be a foundation of strong relationships of any flavor, is that not so?”

He could _feel_ her mouth twist in the direction of the roll of her eyes. “If it is, so is listening. I just told you, no one genuinely wants honesty. It is… it is a trap of some kind. She isn't a hero, can't be. Not for me. What say you about that?” 

The question came out sharp as the fangs of her various animal forms, but his answer was soft and mild as butter. "If there are heroes, they are not meant for one such as I," he told her as he stitched a small tear in his glove. He smiled down at torn leather and fur, but it was tilted in a way that almost made it look sorrowful instead of thoughtful.

"You've also said not to believe you," she told him.

"Ah, but of course I was lying when I said that." His teeth flashed, and in the flickering firelight, you could almost have mistaken it for another smile.

There was a pause, one filled not just with silence but also with significance. “You also dance around what I want to hear.”

“What you want to hear me say, are words borrowed from your mother. And frankly, my dear witch of the wild places, they don't taste very appealing.” He still wasn't looking at her when she hesitated, but she was watching him, and so she saw the downturn of his own mouth. “But you are right in that hearing such things long enough will turn your ears to softer things. I try my best not to lie at all when I can avoid it, but you and I still expect it of me. One fact exchanged for another.”

He glanced up just in time to see pain chase itself across her face. He looked back down. “Better for you to lie.” Her voice had dropped to be barely audible, and he said nothing about it. Why would he? Instead, he allowed her to withdraw, the same way she had allowed it of him. 


	5. Chapter 5

The fireflies flowed between her fingers in silken waves that left nothing in their wake, not even their borrowed light. “This won’t matter tomorrow,” Morrigan told the last beetle, a smaller one that walked up the inside of her thumb. “I could crush out your life with a thought, and no one would notice or care. Certainly not I.”

The beetle chose not to express an opinion, and after a moment longer, Morrigan carefully lifted her palm so that the insect would be well away from the spiderweb overhead.


	6. Chapter 6

His fingers felt clumsy around Warden’s Oath, too big and too unused to holding anything truly precious. “What do I do with it?” He asked Duncan. His tongue felt clumsy, too, stumbling over familiar words that were anything but, now. What were you supposed to do with a reminder of your own impending death?

Duncan frowned back at Alistair. “Does it matter?” He sighed at the newest warden’s expression and closed his eyes, barely resisting the urge to pinch between his brows. “Some keep it on their person the rest of their days. Some sell it as soon as possible, or bury it, or throw it in a latrine. Do whatever feels right to you. In that, is the truest expression of your respect -or lack thereof- of the wardens.”

Alistair swallowed back the first question that cake to mind. The edges of the pendant dug into his palm, he was holding it so tightly. “Of course I do! Have respect, I mean. For you, Ser Duncan! And how you’re so… warden-y, and that oathing! To be commended! Maybe in oath form.”


	7. Chapter 7

Merrill pillowed her cheek on her knee, and exhaled a sigh as she watched the night sky slowly whirl her dances through one of the holes in her roof. “Won’t you ever get tired?” She whispered. “Won’t your muscles ache from holding up your cape for our benefit and just… let it fall? You can’t keep the reality of its weight from crushing us forever, no one can.” Her mouth trembled for a moment, and then she laughed, without one ounce of humor in it. “Not even a goddess.”


	8. Chapter 8

Ludte Hawke scowled and ground the toe of her boot into the puddle where she’d spilled her drink. “Not everything can get wrapped up in a pretty bow, Varric,” she said. He knew without looking at her that despite the sternness of her tone, her expression would be be anything but. “Sometimes things that are broke just stay broken.”

He spread his hands with a helpless attempt at a grin for her. He owed her that much. “That happiness in my stories that you say isn’t real? It is the last and only gift I know how to give you.”

She’d briefly lifted her gaze, but just as swiftly dropped her eyes when she caught sight of that strained smile. “You shouldn’t. Eventually you’re going to run out of blood to give from your wrists.”

“Maybe, but not today.”


	9. Chapter 9

“They say the past is another country…” Fenris rolled the words aroubd in his tongue, tasting them and finding them bitter and tasting like salt. “But those who say this,” he added without looking up at his companion, “never ask if parting from this place of your birth was a glad parting. If you emerged bloody and screaming but clutching at birth with fisted hands.”

Isabela was quiet for a time after he spoke, her arms drawing closer. “I don’t know if my leaving Rivain was as poetic as all that. Most people would call it stumbling from one port to another until I lucked into my current circumstances.”

“Freedom,” was his answer, “can be a bewildering thing. Can make you more unsteady on your feet than any drink. Strange, how people assume that of you, but not of me.”

Isabela shrugged and rearranged herself where she’d been curled up with her face tucked beneath his chin, where he couldn’t see her face. “Is it? Escaped slaves make a better story than unhappy wives. No matter how the unhappiness began or ended, at least the slave only stole himself.”

“Easier to judge violence you can see, rather than that hidden behind smiles.” He hadn’t closed the circle of his arms around her, not tonight. Sometimes he could feel the tension thrumming through her, no matter how light her tone, and knew that she would leave as soon as she’d come if he tried even the most well meant of restraints. Even now, he coukd feel the well defined muscles in her shoulders bunch and release.

“Leave the poetry for the people with the luxury of wanting to sightsee in that country,” she said, half to him but seemingly half to herself, as well. “Don’t look back. We aren’t going that way.”

There were many things he could say to that, some a sigh or a bite or simple weariness given form, but instead he tilted his chin back. He stared unseeing at the gathering storm clouds through the home in his mansion’s roof. From this angle, it could almost have seemed like mist. One that rolled and boiled, inevitably pushing that white and grey wash over everything, obscuring everything. “Maybe,” he murmured, “it can be as simple as saying that the past is unknowable as that other country. Mysterious and far and filled with stories that may as well belong to a stranger.”


	10. Chapter 10

“This character is supposed to be you, right?” Hawke asked him one night. They were curled up against his back on top of the covers while they both took turns reading his latest manuscript. It was a relaxing evening for a change, or should have been, but he’d been waiting for this shoe to drop all night.

“I hope I’m more subtle about it than **that** ,” he said after a beat. He hoped Hawke hadn’t noticed his pause, or the mild hitch in his voice that he tried to hide by shifting, but no dice. Might as well have hoped for the sky to swallow him up like the Orzammar dwarves kept insisting on.

Hawke ignored his half-hearted attempt at misdirection. They had a frown in their voice as they turned back a page. “He never looks at the protagonist’s face, does he? Not once. Why is that?”

Words -dozens, some of them even good- caught in his throat. What finally emerged sounded strange to his his ears. Too casual, or not casual enough. “Maybe he already knows what he’ll see.”

He was answered with a second, smaller pause, before a hand closed around his forearm. “And what do you think you’ll see when you look at me?”

Varric closed his eyes until the stars that burst across his eyelids burned as bright as the fear in his belly. “My mistakes.” He didn’t open his eyes when the warmth on his arm vanished.


	11. Chapter 11

“Don’t you ever get tired, Wynne?”

She raised her gaze from the mesmerizing dance of the firelight -torn, as she’d always been, by the beauty of it all, how the flames resembled ragged fingers or leaves, even as she knew all too well its power to tear away entire lifetimes- and up to the warden’s. “Is that another remark upon my age?” Wynne wasn’t smiling, though she tried her best to inject a bit of humor into her tone. “Or the lateness of the hour? It **is** my watch, after all, but if you insist upon taking over…”

The warden waved her hand impatiently. “You **died** , Wynne. You were dead upon the floor, until Grace saved you. Don’t you ever just… want to stop? Just once?”

It wasn’t hard to guess that the question wasn’t really about her at all. Wynne shrugged. A half smile chased itself across her face before she looked back down. “Both more and less than you might think. Of course I am tired. But… no more than I was ten years ago, or thirty, or the day that-” She pressed her lips into a thin line and shook her head. “All things find their end, warden. I am not so impatient to find mine that I wish to bring it to others by my absence.”

“They aren’t your responsibility.”

“No more than they were yours, wouldn’t you say? Call it a desire to live out the days I could not, as I was. Grace gave me back a short life, yes, but there is so much I am much more eager to find than the fires.” There was that smile again. “Isn’t it funny,” she said, almost to herself. “A small blasphemy to think so, but… all the endings in my life seem to come by fire or blood or both, just as with Andraste. A fine joke to share with her when I meet Her. Maybe,” she said softer still, “She can explain it to me.”


	12. Chapter 12

“Strange, isn’t it?” Dorian tilted his head back to stare up at the stars through the latticework of branches overhead. “How often we seem to retrace our steps, even when in unfamiliar places.”

The inquisitor’s mouth thinned. He started to lift a hand towards Dorian, then let it drop. “What do you mean? Dorian?”

Dorian could only laugh, though there wasn’t any humor in it. For a moment, he could only think of this time last year, when he had been pursuing yet another man who didn’t want him, sideways and at angles. “Circles, my dear man. Everything comes back around again, and…” He trailed off for a moment, then shook his head with a smile. “You’re throwing everything off-center just by…” he glanced at the inquisitor’s open, concerned face, then quickly away. “Just by virtue of who you are.” It wasn’t what he had originally intended to say, but he found he no longer had the courage, if he ever had.


	13. Chapter 13

Zevran and the warden commander sat together without speaking for what felt like hours but could have been only minutes. Usually they could sit together in companionable silence without Zevran ever feeling pressured to speak, but… not today. Today, Zevran’s mouth trembled around the shape of a sound he didn’t know how to give voice to, before curving into a smile. “Do you remember the story of my first murder?” His voice started out steady, only to crack as he went on to say, “Death is the last and only kindness I know how to give.”

His dear warden closed his hand tightly around Zevran’s. Zevran didn’t, couldn’t, look at him but they had never needed to actually see each other before. Not about the things that mattered. “We’ve always respected each other,” the warden said. “Respect me enough now to tell me the truth. You’ve already killed me.”

Zevran’s hand did not shake. He almost wished it would, but a lifetime’s training kept it as steady as his gaze was not. “I killed you years ago. We were simply waiting for both of us to realize it.”

“…One of these days,” The warden laughed quietly, “you will learn to answer a direct question. I’m just sorry I won’t be there to see it.” He fell silent, then, long enough that Zevran had thought he would never speak again, until he did. “When you find love again… I hope they will keep you safe, the way you did me.”


	14. Chapter 14

“You take everything so seriously,” Maric told him one day while lying half-reclined on Loghain’s camp bed. “You really need to slow down, relax, make schedule some time to breathe in there somewhere.”

Loghain disguised a laugh as a snort, but his hand was gentle as he stroked it through Maric’s hair. “What, and be like you? I’ve only ever seen you take girls and dogs seriously.”

“That isn’t true!” Maric protested instantly, earning another, even less convincing snort, but what he said next made Loghain’s breath catch in his throat. “You’re on that list somewhere, too, you know.”

Loghain found himself unable to look at Maric any longer. He instead looked at how his hand’s restless circling through Maric’s hair had gone unsteady and started to shake. “I am so very touched to know I rank so highly in your sight that I may come only just behind your dogs,” he said on a rasp. Maric laughed, and the sound rattled around the too-tight clench of Loghain’s ribs around his heart. Maybe, he wasn’t wrong…?


	15. Chapter 15

Antiva City’s marketplace spiraled away beneath the swing of Zevran’s feet. Whole rainbows of colored canopies vied for attention with voices in a hundred dialects, with an artist singing through brushstrokes, the scent of mulled cachaça and laughing children copying the movements of street performers. Sights and sounds and, yes, smells that had never failed to make his heart swell with pride; although sometimes, admittedly, the city would turn her back on him, just as anyone would. He didn’t take it personally. Why would he?

Taliesen’s voice called him back from his contemplation of the street below him. Zevran turned to see Taliesen and Rinna at his back, as they always were. The thought brought mixed feelings, as they always did, but he pushed the unwelcome feeling down viciously. “She is beautiful at night, my city.”

“Antiva City is yours now, is it?” Taliesen said with a sigh, but his hand sought out Zevran’s hip in the dark all the same. The only lifeline either would accept. “And here I thought it belonged to the crows, or possibly the royal family,” he added belatedly.

“If it belongs to anyone, it is the other type of crow,” Rinna said. She spoke more quietly than they, but it was impossible to miss the odd tone to her words. She had been acting just as odd lately. On edge, more than even a crow apprentice who had lived long enough to become a crow tended to openly show.

It was worrying, enough that Zevran’s hand stilled before it had even begun to lift towards Taliesen’s, though even he couldn’t have said whether it was to hold or to push away. “You are getting to be as gloomy as the old masters. Do not let a few worn tools disturb you so, my dear Rinna. Of course we will live forever. How could we not?”


	16. Chapter 16

Dorian held his hands cupped before him, fingers curled as if to support something incredibly fragile, one that weighed far more than mere physics or words should allow. When he spoke, his voice was almost a sigh. “You just won’t give up on me, will you?”

The inquisitor’s brows drew together, and he took a step forward before he stopped. “You know I won’t,” he said with an uneasy attempt at a smile that didn’t reach his voice. “How could I? You have been there every step of the way beside me, how could I do anything but-“

“Very easily, it turns out. The fact that you aren’t, won’t, is…” Dorian gave a quiet laugh and looked up at the inquisitor for the first time, eyes wet and shining. “Terrifying. Far more so than the alternative. At least then I would know where I stand. As it is… I feel as if the ground is constantly shifting underfoot, knowing that the day will come when I will lose my footing and all of this will come crashing down.”

The inquisitor’s mouth twisted. He then swiftly melt before a startled Dorian, face completely open and unselfconscious. “I can’t promise that nothing will ever happen in this life to either of us, but. One thing I do know is that life is crafted piece by piece every day, and that the pieces we share make both of our lives stronger for it. Maybe we don’t have forever, but today? In this moment? How could I be asked to give up the man who has shown me how very high I could rise?”

Dorian’s face broke, and he leaned to rest his forehead against the inquisitor’s shoulder. He was quiet for long seconds, though the inquisitor couldn’t say for certain if Dorian was crying without making a sound at all. Perhaps he was, because when he finally spoke again, his voice shook. “That was beautiful, amatus. And if you bring that last bit up again later as a phallic joke I will be forced to retaliate.”

“Oh Dorian,” his love said with a slow, relieved smile he pressed against Dorian’s temple, “of course I will.”


	17. Chapter 17

Wynne stared down at the stew she was stirring with an automatic, mechanical motion. Her eyes had glazed over from a weariness that made her long to stop moving even for a moment, but a lifetime of fighting against the inertia of fear gave her another sort of muscle memory, too. So she sat and she stirred and she turned her mouth into an approximation of a smile when the warden came by.

“Still awake?” They asked. “You looked ready fall asleep on your feet hours ago.”

Wynne sat and she stirred and she smiled, the way she had almost every day since she had first been brought to Kinloch Hold as a child. She wanted to tell the warden that if she gave into those urges, she would still be lying cold and dead upon the floor where she had fallen, or in any of a thousand places before or since. But she did not. Instead, she crinkled her eyes in an expression she didn’t feel and said, “As are you, I cannot help but notice. Something on your mind?”

The warden’s brows drew together. “You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?”

“Changing the subject,” they said. “You’re always turning it around. Making anything I want to know about you into being about me, instead.”

“You are a grey warden. You hold all of our fates in your hands. Whereas anything I say or do not say is of little consequence in the greater story of things.” Wynne had dropped her gaze back down to the food, and gave it another stir. “It matters only in framing your context.”

“That isn’t true,” the warden frowned. “You’re talking like you’re just… set dressing. That’s never been true, even if people told you it was.”

Wynne did not reply to this, save to smile and tell them that dinner would be done, soon, and to fetch the others. And if she held the ladle in a white-knuckled grip, what did it matter?


End file.
